How to take vacation without using your vacation days – Part 2

For those who have been following the posts from this week, by now you have learned how to “save” your vacation days if your firm has a 0.1 billable day policy, and the reasons why I believe this is actually a fair policy to the firm and to associates.

But, you ask, what if my firm forces me to account for seven hours per day? I can’t simply bill 0.1 billable hours and then get a tan while sipping a Sex on the Beach.

No, you can’t. But the good news is this: there are other, creative things you can do.

The “working vacation” is a great way to mix business and pleasure, and save those precious vacation days. When you are buried up to your ears in work, and sick of spending 12+ hours a day in the office, why not change your setting? If you are in LA, go work in your firm’s NY office. If your firm is international, even better. Take a trip to Paris, work out of the Paris office during the day, and enjoy your evenings off. The human mind works in funny ways, but you may have noticed that when you are working really hard over an extended period of time, even one evening off seems like a huge deal. Conversely, if you’ve had a long vacation, even working a few hours becomes tiring. Learn to channel the adaptive nature of your brain and take advantage of it. Trust me, even having an hour to eat dinner at a fine restaurant in a foreign location feels like a vacation when you’ve been toiling away and eating Chinese takeout every night for two straight months.

Even better when you can make up a reason why you need to work out of the foreign office — your case is staffed there, you need to meet with a certain partner in that office, you have to meet a witness there. The best part about that is that usually you can get part or all of your business expenses comped. Not only do you not use vacation hours, you also don’t have to pay for it.

What else? How about distribution of time on your time entry from one day to another? Let’s say you worked from 9 a.m. this morning until 2 a.m. the next day. The reason you worked so hard was because you needed to finish up a lot of work before you go on vacation tomorrow. Ideally, you’d like not to use your vacation time but your firm doesn’t allow the 0.1 hour policy, so you have to account for 7 hours somehow.

Assuming that out of the 17 hours between 9 a.m. and 2 a.m., you billed 15 hours and spent 2 hours doing other stuff. How can you apportion your time? Here are the possibilities:

Option #1: 12/4/09 — 15 hours doing W, X, Y, and Z

12/5/09 — 7 hours billed to vacation

In Option #1, all your billable time is billed to one day. It is technically one day in the sense that you were in the office the whole day, and you are ignoring the fact that at midnight, you have now moved into the next day. This option is least attractive because you end up billing 7 hours to vacation. So what can we do?

Option #2: 12/4/09 — 13 hours doing W, X and Y

12/5/09 — 2 hours doing Z; 5 hours billed to vacation

Option #2 is better because it moves the two hours after midnight to the following day, where it legitimately belongs. This option is more attractive because you have now “saved” two vacation hours. But can we do better?

Option #3: 12/4/09 — 8 hours doing W and X

12/5/09 — 7 hours doing Y and Z

Option #3 is the best choice because now, you’ve accounted for 7 billable hours for the next day, and used NO vacation time for it. You ask, “How can this be justified?” Well, the two hours after midnight are easy because it’s technically another day. No argument there. What about the other five hours? This depends on what you consider a work day. Does the work day end for billing purposes when you go home and go to sleep (Option #1), at the stroke of midnight (Option #2), or at the end of COB for the firm staff and for the courts (Option #3)? As far as I know, there are no official rules governing when one billable day ends and when the next begins. If you calculate your billable time based on COB, the time you worked after-hours can “count” for the following day.

Congratulations! Even without the 0.1 hour policy, you have now found ways to save vacation time. Next week, we’ll continue this topic with discussion about apportioning billable hours, the client “10 hour max rule,” rounding, and other billable madness. For now, start planning your next “work vacation” and save up those vacation hours!